So Irene fetched the eggs from the pantry, fetched the bread to make toast. Mr. Foster made no move to help, although he could make his own breakfast perfectly well, when Irene wasn’t around to do it for him. He made conversation instead, that was his contribution. He told Irene about this fellow in Reno, how he might want to buy Mr. Foster’s new idea, the patent for the thingamajig—Irene wasn’t really paying attention, hadn’t really kept up with her father’s latest gadget—for possibly a lot of money, Mr. Foster wouldn’t say how much, didn’t want to get her hopes up. But the fellow was pretty serious. Bit eccentric, lived all by himself in a ranch way out of town, rich as Midas.

“How do you know?” asked Irene. “How do you know he’s that rich?”

“That’s what people say.”

Irene slid her father’s eggs on the toast—over easy, that’s how he liked them, yolk gushing all over the place as soon as you pricked them with your fork—and handed him the plate. He reached for the salt.

“Go on,” said Irene, so she wouldn’t have to talk, and Mr. Foster went on. He told her about the drive, how he figured to save the money for another night at the motor lodge and set out at nine p.m. over the Sierra Nevada, tire went flat right away in the Truckee Pass, another tire blew out near Modesto. But oh, it was a beautiful night to be out driving. The air was clear and dry, so you could see the whole Milky Way spread out in the southwest sky. Not another soul on the road, not until the sun poked up and the ranchers started their rounds. “And the smell, Irene, you know that smell. The sweet, dry grass and the dust and the sage.”

“It’s a good smell,” she said. By now, she’d come to sit at the table across from him, drinking her coffee. The sound of his voice, it was the sound of her childhood, and it wasn’t all bad. Hank Foster could spin a good story. Whatever his faults, he could make you smell the air and taste the fried chicken and laugh at the poor sucker at the drugstore, whether or not any of those things had actually existed.

Her father pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You mind?”

Irene waved her hand. Her father pulled out a cigarette, lit it with a match from a matchbook that said Lincoln Motor Lodge, and took a drag or two. Irene went into the sitting room and brought back an ashtray.

“Say, now,” said Mr. Foster. “Here’s an idea. I hear there’s an air show in Burbank this afternoon.”

Irene dropped the ashtray next to her father’s coffee cup and stared at the end of his cigarette. “What did you say?”